Fit Together Partnership Connects Walnut Cove, NC Destinations

Sometimes the best ideas start as a sparkle in someone's eye. "Could an empty billboard somehow help get our residents more active?," Angie Cullen asked herself. Cullen is the project director for the Fit Together community partnership in Stokes County, North Carolina, and she makes it her daily work to find ways to help people be more active. That sparkle turned into action and a gift of health will be delivered this month to the residents of the Town of Walnut Cove.

Walnut Cove is a small, rural town within Stokes County, located along the Virginia border in central North Carolina. The town is the home to roughly 1,500 people. Walnut Cove has several important downtown destinations, including a library, senior center, and an elementary school. However, these locations were disconnected, preventing people from safely walking between them. In response, the Fit Together partnership embarked on a two-year endeavor to build connecting sidewalks along the community's important routes. Fit Together is a grant program of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation, designed to promote innovative and integrated strategies to increase access and reduce barriers to physical activity in rural North Carolina communities.

Picture of the billboard before the gift was revealed

While the sidewalk construction was met with support from the residents, challenges such as rain and other construction delays kept it from being built by the target completion date. These delays worried Cullen. "I thought that residents would lose hope or excitement about the sidewalk and a lot of our hard work would go to waste," she said. Cullen and her partners brainstormed ways to keep citizens engaged while the construction labored on. Their efforts involved making door-to-door visits to share information and secure residents' support for the sidewalk. The Stokes County Fit Together partnership also attended community meetings and worked with local organizations to enlist their partnership with the project. These efforts to maintain community enthusiasm were further supported by a creative idea that began as that early sparkle in Cullen's eye: a billboard campaign.

With the sidewalk's December completion finally in sight, Cullen worked with Active Living by Design in developing her idea to utilize the often vacant billboard in the Town of Walnut Cove to promote the new sidewalk. Thanks to her leadership and negotiation, Cullen secured an extra month of posting free-of-charge, so she decided to create a two-part billboard campaign. The first billboard is a teaser, announcing in November that a gift for the Town of Walnut Cove is on its way. The second billboard reveals that the gift is not only the completion of the much anticipated sidewalk, but also a gift of active living and good health to the town residents.

Cullen says that effective partnerships have been key to the project's success. The sidewalk and other project components have been made possible through a partnership between Healthy Carolinians of Stokes and Stokes-Reynolds Memorial Hospital. These two partners lead the Stokes Fit Together partnership, and are supported by a wealth of other collaborating partners: the Town of Walnut Cove, Walnut Cove Public Library, London Elementary, Walnut Cove Senior Center, Walnut Cove Colored School, London Elementary, Walnut Ridge Assisted Living, and Walnut Cove Health Center. These partners will continue to be engaged in the project's next step of offering programs and other supports to connect places and people as they use the new sidewalks in their daily lives.

Thanks to the big-scale thinking and perseverance on the part of Cullen and the Stokes County Fit Together partnership, residents of Walnut Cove will have much to celebrate in the New Year. "The community partners' hard work and creative approach is sure to get residents of Walnut Cove talking about and using the new sidewalk," Cullen said. "Everyone in Walnut Cove and Stokes County can be proud of the efforts and success of this truly community-based project."

Resources

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation

Healthy Carolinians of Stokes